First, this is a state of the art, newly introduced drive from WDC. In my opinion it is the best general-use drive you can get at this price point.

Prior to my purchase, I read several negative reviews from prior customers who voiced dissatisfaction with Amazon’s packaging of OEM drives. Any chance of damage in shipping would indeed be reason to shop elsewhere for such a sensitive item, but on one such page of ranting and frustration I saw a note from Amazon that they had recently addressed these concerns, so I proceeded to order the drive.

Here’s the latest and I hope final word on this issue: Problem solved. The drive arrives sealed in an anti-static bag, secured by two end-mounted shock absorbing plastic caddies, then double-boxed with the usual sealed air padding. The redundant packing system appears to be well-designed and the drive has been working like a champ.

So buy with confidence and kudos to Amazon for responding to customer reviews and ensuring appropriate, safe packaging for this product.

I’ve been using Western Digital hard drives since getting into computers in 1998. In fact I’ve never owned anything but WD hard drives (from 4.3gig to 1TB). In all my years of using them I’ve only had 2 go bad, though they never “completely” failed. This speaks of Western Digital’s consistency in reliability.

With that said I love the Caviar Blacks and have 3 of them in my system – 500, 750, and now the new 1TB SATA 3 (64Meg cache).

While there is a noticeable speed gain over my previous 1TB Caviar Black (32Meg), the previous version was/is extremely quiet! This new SATA 3 drive is LOUD! It sounds like a percolating coffee pot at its highest boiling point, especially during boot-up or accessing files. Very annoying, especially if it’s the noisiest part of your system!

BTW this is a replacement drive as I thought the first drive was faulty due to the same noise. With that I called Western Digital about this issue…. and to make a long story short, they say this is normal and that drive wasn’t designed with noise in mind, that if you want a “quieter” drive, get the Caviar Blue.

Make of that what you will….

All I know is that the older 32mge cache Caviar Black drives ARE quieter than their 64meg cache cousins.

Those looking for quieter WD drives might consider looking elsewhere (Blue or Green series) if noise is a factor over speed.

4 stars.

Edit. Went back to my previous drive because of the noise. If you want a caviar black that’s quiet, go with the 1FALS (32meg) vs the 2FAEX (64meg)

I bought this drive to store pictures, music and files on as replacement for an older WD drive that failed. I went with the Black series for it’s speed and reliability. Amazon’s packaging was fine (see pics that I added to product above) and installation, initialization and formatting went without a hitch. The drive performed very well; was fast and pretty quiet (especialy compared to the OEM WD Blue drive in my PC). I did notice that the drive would get rather warm when I still had the computer case open but, I have three fans spinning in there so didn’t think much of it. Six weeks later, I received a “drive not accessible” error and after running the WD Data LifeGuard diagnostics, determined that the drive had multiple bad sectors and failed the SMART test. I tried to recover the sectors but, it wouldn’t work. A call to WD tech support confirmed that it was toast and they sent me out a replacement. The interesting part was that the replacement was shipped in nothing more than a small corrugate box with just the drive and the plastic end caps inside. The new drive has been in for two days now and so far it’s OK. I gave this 3 stars for failing after 6 weeks but, still think it’s a good drive for the money and believe that I had some bad luck. If I write back in 6 weeks with another failed drive, I wont be so charitable.